We held a successful first meeting of the Executive Board of the MEDINE2 Erasmus Academic Network in Antwerp on 3rd and 4th December 2009. We are currently preparing a full record of the meeting, which will be published on the MEDINE2 website.
There is a photograph on the website already showing that we were visited during the meeting by St Nicholas and his helper, and we hope that he brought us good fortune! We are extremely grateful to Karel van Liempt and his staff in the University of Antwerp for hosting this meeting.
Some key decisions of the Executive are as follows:
First MEDINE2 Annual General Meeting, Edinburgh 24th and 25th May 2010
We will hold an inaugural Annual General Meeting of the MEDINE2 Network at the University of Edinburgh on 24th and 25th May 2010. This "launch meeting" will allow us to finalise the overall structure and shape of the Network and to carefully plan our work over the next three years. We hope that as many partner institutions as possible will be represented at the meeting. Each partner institution is entitled to send one delegate to this meeting, with travel and accommodation costs for two nights covered by the MEDINE2 grant. Other staff from partner institutions are welcome to attend on a self-funding basis. Further details of the meeting will follow in due course, but the plan is to have a whole-day meeting on the 24th May and a morning-only session on the 25th May.
We understand that the ECTS Medicine Association, who are leading Workpackage 2 in the MEDINE2 Network, will be holding a meeting in parallel with the MEDINE2 AGM.
Membership of Workpackage Teams - a preference survey
In order to distribute the work of the Network evenly and to achieve a balanced budget, we need to have a planned approach to membership of the seven development Workpackage teams. Several partners and their representatives have already indicated which Workpackage team they wish to join, and have agreed this with the Workpackage leader. These arrangements will be respected by the coordinating centre. However, we wish to ensure that every partner is clearly linked to membership of a specific Workpackage team. This will allow their representative to be funded for attendance at Workpackage meetings. We have therefore prepared a short preference survey which can be accessed at this URL - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5L3D5QQ.
Even if you have already agreed membership with a particular Workpackage, I would be very grateful if you could click on this link and complete this survey as soon as possible (it will only take a minute or so). Once all the replies are received, we will prepare a proposal for the distribution of partners across the Workpackage Teams.
Workpackage Team Meetings
It is intended that each of the seven development Workpackages will hold a meeting in the autumn of 2010, to take forward the plans which are in place and which will be further developed at the May AGM. Dates and venues for these meetings will be circulated as soon as possible.
Project Manager
The post of Project Manager for the MEDINE2 Network has been advertised and we will be interviewing candidates between now and Christmas. We hope to have someone in post by the end of January.
MEDINE2 Website
Work is continuing to develop the MEDINE2 website into a useful tool to support the work of the Network. The members area will formally be opened in early February 2010.
Allan Cumming
